Medieval Delhi
Sadly for Delhi, Akbar shifted the capital south to Agra and then to a newly built city called Fatehpur Sikri. The latter took fifteen years to build but it was abandoned after only fourteen years because, like Tughlaqabad, its water supply was deemed unreliable. The capital moved back to Agra. Meanwhile, Delhi remained an important city but would have to play second fiddle to Agra till Akbar’s grandson built Shahjehanabad (Old Delhi) a century later. Akbar did, however, make one important addition to Delhi’s skyline—the tomb of his father. Humayun’s tomb is a grand affair and an architectural precursor to the Taj Mahal. Since it is not usually mobbed by tourists like the Taj, it is a much more satisfying place to linger and retains the air of an emperor’s tomb.
I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that medieval India was only about the building, pillaging, abandoning and rebuilding of cities. One must remember that most of the population lived in rural areas. Babur tells us that Indian villagers rarely invested in either irrigation or in building permanent homes. Instead, they were ever prepared to abandon their villages and take refuge in the forests. 27 This is how the common people had coped with the previous three centuries of invasion and war. Much of the country remained forested and, in some cases, may have reverted to wilderness after habitations were abandoned. There were forests just outside Delhi, where its rulers indulged in hunting within a few hours’ ride from the city walls. Feroze Shah even built a number of hunting lodges along the Aravalli ridges, including one in what is now the urban village of Mahipalpur, very close to the international airport. Deer, leopards and possibly lions were found where bright neon lights now announce budget hotels. British records speak of the ‘Hurriana lion’ as late as the 1820s. 28
THE MUGHAL HUNT
Babur’s diary expresses his disdain for the people of India in barely a couple of paragraphs but he was more impressed by the flora and fauna of the country and spent several pages describing them. Babur tells us about peacocks, elephants and river dolphins. He was particularly intrigued by the rhinoceros that he encountered in forests near Peshawar. It is interesting that rhinos were found so far to the west in the sixteenth century. They are now found only in the swampy grasslands of Assam, North Bengal and Nepal’s Terai regions. Oddly, Babur does not mention the big cats. It is possible that he had encountered lions and cheetahs in Afghanistan and northeastern Iran and did not think of them as uniquely Indian.
The Mughals were enthusiastic hunters whose expeditions are recorded in numerous writings and in paintings. They hunted a wide array of animals including nilgai, blackbuck, birds and, of course, lions. Note that there are relatively fewer accounts and paintings related to hunting tigers. This may merely reflect the fact that the Mughals did most of their hunting in the north-west of the country, which was lion, rather than tiger, country. We know that there were important hunting grounds near Agra, Delhi, and Bhatinda in Punjab. Most of these areas are now densely populated and intensively farmed but Bernier tells us that there were large expanses of uncultivated land near Delhi and Agra as well as on the road to Lahore. It is estimated that barely 27.5 per cent of Agra suba, at the heart of the empire, was cultivated in 1600. 29 The human population of India at that time was around 116 million. This means that there were large areas that were available to wildlife and several tracts were reserved exclusively for the royal hunt. The association of the lion with the power of the State remained. The hunting of lions was reserved for the king and the royal family and was closed to others, except by special permission.
There are many stories about Emperor Akbar’s lion hunts. On one occasion in 1568, Akbar went hunting in the Mewat region near Alwar, south of Gurgaon. A lion emerged and was quickly slain by a hail of arrows shot by his companions. Akbar was annoyed and ordered that should another lion emerge, he would tackle it himself. At that very moment, another lion did emerge and the emperor shot it in the eye with an arrow. The enraged animal charged but Akbar could not get a good shot even though he had dismounted from his horse. In the excitement of the moment, one of the courtiers shot an arrow that infuriated the lion who mauled the man. The animal had to be finished off by other courtiers. 30
As one can see, Akbar was quite ready to take personal risks and, in his younger days, would hunt on horseback or even on foot. His main indulgence was the use of a large number of trained cheetahs to help him in the chase. Later in life he would keep a stable of a thousand of these beasts. Over time, however, the emperors grew used to hunting from the relative safety of an elephant’s back and to the use of increasingly accurate guns. In a single hunting expedition to Rupbas near Agra in February–March 1610, Akbar’s successor, Jehangir, and his companions killed seven lions, seventy Nilgai, fifty-one blackbuck, eighty-two other animals, 129 birds and 1023 fish—all this within a fifty-six day period. It was still a risky activity as illustrated by a story from the same year.
On a hunt in 1610 in Bari near Agra, one of Emperor Jehangir’s courtiers, Anup Rai, came across a half-devoured cow and traced a lion in the thicket. The animal was surrounded and the emperor was informed. Jehangir rushed to the spot and set up his musket on a stand. He fired twice and missed. The lion charged and the emperor’s retinue bolted and, according to him, even trampled on him in the panic! Anup Rai saved Jehangir’s life by battling the lion to the ground with his bare hands till Prince Khurram killed the animal with a sword. That a Hindu Rajput was not just accompanying the royal family on a hunt but was willing to risk his life for a Muslim king—Taimur’s direct descendant, no less—shows how the relations between Hindus and Muslims had evolved over the preceding half-century. Jehangir gave Anup Rai the title Ani Rai Singhdalan, meaning Commander of Troops and Lion Crusher. 31
A few years after the above events, the first English ambassador arrived at the Mughal court. Sir Thomas Roe was a distinguished diplomat and was in India from 1615 to 1619. He became a close friend of Emperor Jehangir and was even his drinking partner on several occasions. However, this does not mean that he was given blanket permission to freely kill lions. In 1617, a lion and a wolf made nightly raids on Roe’s camp near Mandu and killed a number of his sheep and goats. However, it was forbidden for him to hurt the animals and had to send for the monarch’s special leave. It was eventually granted but the lion escaped. The wolf was not so lucky. 32
Roe tells us that the lion was a very important part of royal imagery and one of the royal standards had a lion and the rising sun. This symbolism was shared with both the Shahs of Iran as well as the indigenous Hindu tradition. The Mughals were conscious that they were inheritors of an ancient imperial dream and Emperor Jehangir inserted his own inscription in Persian on the Mauryan pillar in Allahabad. Thus, the column has inscriptions by three of India’s most powerful emperors—Ashoka, Samudragupta and Jehangir—a continuity maintained over eighteen centuries! What is going on? Whether one takes Jehangir’s inscription on the Mauryan pillar or the effort to link Akbar to Kalhana’s history of Kashmir, the Mughals were trying to build the foundations of their empire in India within the framework of India’s civilization. Therefore, they were systematically inserting themselves into civilizational memory. Notwithstanding Feroze Shah Tughlaq’s interest in Mauryan pillars, this was a radical shift away from how earlier Delhi Sultans saw themselves.
THE VOYAGES OF ADMIRAL ZHENG HE
While northern India was suffering from waves of invasion from Central Asia, the world of Indian Ocean trade continued to flourish. Both Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta were witness to this. However, under the surface, the role of Indians in the network began to change from the end of the twelfth century. Indian merchants had once been explorers and risk-takers who criss-crossed the oceans in their stitched ships. They could be found in large numbers in ports from the Persian Gulf to China. Buddhist and Brahmin scholars sailed in large numbers to South-East Asia where they were in great demand. Suddenly, a little over a century after the Chola naval raids on Srivijaya, they almost all disa
ppeared. What happened?
The proximate cause for this change was the enforcement of caste rules prohibiting the crossing of the seas. However, the caste rules were merely a reflection of a wider malaise. As I have argued in an earlier book, The Indian Renaissance, there appears to have been a shift in India’s cultural and civilizational attitude towards innovation and risk-taking. 33 This is not the place to discuss the root causes of this transformation, but there are many independent signs of the closing of the mind. Sanskrit, once an evolving and dynamic language, stopped absorbing new words and usages and eventually fossilized. Sanskrit literature became obsessed with purity of form and became formulaic. Similarly, scientific progress halted as the emphasis shifted from experimentation to learned discourse.
It is interesting that foreigners who visited India at that time noticed the change and wrote about it. Al-Biruni, writing at the same time that Mahmud Ghazni was making his infamous raids, commented that contemporary Indian scholars were so full of themselves that they were unwilling to learn anything from the rest of the world. He then contrasts this attitude with that of their ancestors.
Given this cultural shift, Indian merchants became increasingly shore-based, while shipping passed mostly into the hands of Arabs. However, there were also Jews, Persians and even the Chinese. Ibn Batuta saw a number of Chinese ships in Calicut (Kozhikode) and he describes a military junk that must have accompanied a merchant fleet. It was large enough to accommodate a thousand men, six hundred sailors and four hundred men-at-arms. In other words, Ibn Batuta was exploiting a very active trading network on his journeys. It is testimony to the vigour and sophistication of this network that Ibn Batuta met a man from Ceuta, a city very close to his home town of Tangier, first in Delhi and then, accidentally, again in China. 34 Ibn Batuta may have been the one to write about his travels but the routes he took were well known to the world of Arab merchants.
Nonetheless, the spirit of ancient India was kept alive for several more centuries by the kingdoms of South East Asia. Angkor continued to be the capital of the Khmer empire till it was sacked by the Thais in 1431. Its ruins must be seen to be believed. Lesser known but equally interesting are the remains of the kingdom of Champa in Vietnam. The kingdom flourished till its capital Vijaya was sacked by Viet troops in 1471. A smaller Cham kingdom would limp along till it, too, was overrun in the late seventeenth century. Hindu temples built by the Chams are scattered across Vietnam—a few are still used by the tiny Balamon Cham community that continues to practise Hinduism (they number around 30,000). Sadly, the most important cluster of Cham temples in My Son was heavily bombed by the Americans during the Vietnam war. The site is now designated a UNESCO World Heritage site but frankly there is very little to see. The small museum at the entrance has some pre-war photographs that provide an idea of its former glory.
Perhaps the most vigorous of the India-inspired cultures, however, was that of Java. In the fourteenth century, the Majapahits of Java had established direct or indirect control over much of what is now Indonesia. As they expanded, they pushed out the ancient Srivijaya kingdom based in Sumatra. A naval raid on the Srivijaya capital of Palembang in 1377 finally eliminated their main rival in the region. 35
Faced with the Javan threat, one of the Srivijaya princes, Sang Nila Utama, is said to have sought refuge in the Riau cluster of islands, just south of the Malay peninsula. One day, so the story goes, he had gone hunting on the island of Temasek where he is said to have seen a lion. So, when he built a settlement here, he named it Singapura (Sanskrit for Lion-City). This is how Singapore got its name—although the prince had almost certainly not seen a lion but a Malayan tiger. The last wild tiger of Singapore was killed in the 1930s in the neighborhood of Choa Chu Kang.
One of Sang Nila Utama’s successors, Parmeswara, appears to have found Singapore untenable due to local rivalries and the continued threat of the Javans. He moved farther north and established his headquarters at Melaka (also spelled Malacca). This is what South-East Asia looked like when Admiral Zheng He arrived with the Chinese ‘treasure fleet’.
Zheng He was an unlikely admiral for the Chinese fleet. He was a Muslim eunuch from land-locked Yunnan who had been brought as a boy prisoner to the Ming court and castrated. Yet, he led seven major naval expeditions between 1405 and 1433 that visited South-East Asia, India, Sri Lanka, Arabia and East Africa. The ‘treasure fleets’ were of an astonishing scale, with over hundred ships and tens of thousands of men. Chinese naval technology at this stage was centuries ahead of the rest of the world. In recent years, some authors have argued that Zheng He may even have visited the Americas. He certainly had the technology, but I am not convinced that he actually made the journey across the Pacific.
The naval expeditions had many objectives including trade and exploration. However, the main goal was to project Chinese power and to cement its geo-political position. The Chinese had overthrown Mongol rule just a few decades earlier, and they were very keen to establish their place in the world. If the sheer size of the fleet did not overawe the locals, Zheng He was prepared to make military interventions as he did in a civil war in Sri Lanka.
When Zheng He was making his voyages, there already existed a number of Chinese settlements in South East Asia but the Majapahit empire of Java was the most powerful in the region. 36 Indeed, a century earlier, the Javans had militarily beaten back Chinese–Mongol attempts to establish control in the region. In 1378, the Ming emperor had sent envoys to try and instal his candidate on the Srivijaya throne. The Majapahit had, not surprisingly, seen this as interference in their sphere of influence and had killed the envoys. 37
Zheng He would have been aware of this history. The Chinese admiral, therefore, decided to create a counterweight by supporting Parmeswara’s nascent kingdom in Melaka. A large Chinese settlement was created in Melaka and Parmeswara personally visited the Ming court. Most interestingly, the Chinese encouraged the Melakans to convert to Islam. Zheng He and many of his commanders were Muslims, but this policy is unlikely to have been driven merely by religious zeal. By most indications, Zheng He had a pragmatic view of religion. It is probable that Chinese support of Islam in South East Asia was more of a geo-political strategy to create a counterweight to the Hindus of Java.
It is even possible that the Chinese wanted to diminish the outside risk of an Indian revival re-exerting its influence on the region. The Chinese of this period were very conscious of themselves as a civilizational nation and wanted to establish themselves as the civilizational top dog. In any event, the Chinese strategy set in motion the steady Islamization of South East Asia. 38 Melaka boomed while the Majapahit slowly withdrew till the last of the Majapahit princes sought refuge in the small island of Bali, where their descendants have kept alive their culture. The network of Chinese merchants survived European colonization and they are still an important part of business in the region.
The Chinese domination of the seas, however, came to an abrupt end. The mandarins decided that the voyages were not worth the expense. The treasure fleets were allowed to rot and their records suppressed. Like India, China turned inward and slipped into centuries of decline. Technological superiority could not save China from the closing of the mind. For a while, it seemed that the Indian Ocean would revert to the Arabs but that was not to be. In December 1497, a small Portuguese fleet rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed boldly into the Indian Ocean.
6
The Mapping of India
As we saw in Chapter 3, geographical awareness jumped sharply between the Vedic Age and the Iron Age. The epics clearly show knowledge of the far corners of the subcontinent. They certainly had a fairly detailed knowledge of the terrain by the time of the Mauryan empire. But, did ancient Indians try to map their country? Over centuries of maritime trade, they would have come to know quite a lot about the geography of the Indian Ocean rim, even as far as the Chinese coast in the west and of the Red Sea in the east. At the same time, they were also quite used to diagrammatic
representation of ideas, including architectural plans. Thanks to Aryabhatta, by the time of the Guptas, Indians were aware that the world was spherical and even had a fairly accurate estimate of its circumference. All the ingredients of cartography were there—one would have expected the Indians to pull together this knowledge to systematically map their country and the surrounding oceans. Similarly, one would expect that there would be maritime manuals equivalent to the Greek Periplus to help merchants and seamen.
Yet, there is nothing to prove that ancient Indians ever attempted to map their country or systematically write down geographical knowledge. A seaman’s manual written in the Kutchhi dialect of Gujarat has been found, but it exists as a relatively modern copy and nothing is known of its history.1 Of maps there are none. Of course, it is entirely possible that such things existed but have been lost. What survives is a cosmological scheme centred around ‘Jambudwipa’ or the Continent of the Rose Apple that was really not meant as a cartographic description.2
I am not suggesting that ancient Indians did not have a sense of geography. If anything, they were very strongly conscious of the layout of the subcontinent and, given their maritime activities, of the Indian Ocean rim. Thus, when the famous eighth-century philosopher Adi Shankaracharya set up four monasteries, he chose sites in the four corners of the country—Puri in the east, Dwarka in the west, Sringeri in the south and Joshimath in the north. This is clearly not a random distribution. Nonetheless, it does seem that cartography as a science did not flourish in ancient India.
In contrast, the Arabs wrote several books on geography during the medieval period. They also preserved some of the works of classical scholars like Ptolemy of Alexandria at a time when Christian Europe would have dismissed such knowledge as pagan. In the twelfth century, the famous Moorish geographer, Al Idrisi, drew a map that combined his own knowledge with that of Ptolemy. It showed the Indian Ocean as landlocked, an idea that suited Arab interests by discouraging any attempt by Europeans to find a sea route to the east. By the fourteenth century, the Persians were drawing maps that show the Indian peninsula. Nonetheless, the quality of cartography remained quite basic. The real experts of medieval cartography were the Chinese. They had long been drawing maps of their own country. By the time of Admiral Zheng He, or perhaps as a result of his voyages, they had good strip-maps of shipping routes through South East Asia and even of parts of the East African coast. These are mostly in the nature of sailing instructions rather than accurate representations of the physical geography, but they are surprisingly detailed and far in advance of anything possessed by other people.
Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography Page 15